The customer’s always right – It began as a retail philosophy. Some attribute it to Marshall Field.
Simply put, the origin was to make the customers happy.
It became a 20thcentury catchphrase that has moved forward into the 21st. Satisfaction guaranteed!
Make them feel special. Make them feel important and make sure they leave fulfilled. Just give them what they want.
In creative services and in business, we definitely want our clients to feel like they are getting what they pay for.
However, they hire us, they contract us, they engage us because we offer a service they don’t have. We serve a purpose and a specialty that justifies a budget.
They NEED us. How cool is that? They rely on us to provide something they can’t do for themselves.
Sure, they have ideas about their service/product, abstract as it may be. They arrive with something, and this is where it gets, or should get good. Our job is not to ‘just give them what they want’. Quite the contrary, our job is to challenge them to think beyond what they offer as a starting point. We take the idea and develop it into a conceptual strategy. We invest our time, our resources and create a plan that brings the service and/or product to market. To get the content into the eyes and ears of a consumer base that sees it, processes it and hopefully spends money to have it.
How do we get the client to believe in us? How do we get them to understand that we can and will mediate on their behalf the right way to convey the message to the end user? Will they allow us to cross over their boundaries often imposed by their lack of creative IQ? Will they allow us the freedom to make judgment calls based on pure insight, expertise and now – data?
That’s where the challenge comes into play. Earning the trust and demonstrating, with great conviction they made the right choice to shop here. We have to earn that validation.
Allow the client/customer adequate space to present the launch pad. It’s up to us to build the rocket and blast it off.